Gordon Ramsay

by Neil Simpson

  And then Angus Deayton came back into the kitchen as usual to read out the winner’s name. James Dreyfus had missed out and the Celebrity Chef award went to Jennifer Ellison. ‘I can’t believe it, it’s been the hardest thing I have ever done. I didn’t know how to boil an egg before this show,’ she admitted – just as Gordon offered her a job at Claridge’s. ‘She was a revelation, a complete surprise, the best chef in the house,’ he said, praise immediately backed up by Mark Sargeant. ‘Jen was a real natural; she had a clear head, a great memory and a bit of finesse about her. She could go on to any section and pretty much do it. She had common sense and she was able to follow instructions and keep it together when things went wrong,’ he said, before offering her a job himself.

  With the end-of-show party still in full swing, Gordon and Tana were driven back over the Thames to their home in Wandsworth. The experiment, the adventure, was over. In theory, Hell’s Kitchen had taken just three weeks of Gordon’s time: one for the initial training, two for filming. But when all the planning meetings, promotions and rehearsals had been taken into account it felt at times like three years. So had it been worth it?

  As far as the ratings were concerned, the news was good. The mid-series meltdown had been reversed and ITV said it had ended up over the moon about the audience share the show had delivered. Perhaps more importantly for Gordon, his staff told him that bookings hadn’t slumped at any of his restaurants. Diners had not been put off by the thought that he was on television rather than in his kitchens, and were not now boycotting him in protest at his language or his treatment of his chefs. And while several high-profile rival chefs had spoken out against the show early on, the feeling among his peers seemed to be that it was a storm in a measuring cup. The Ramsay brand hadn’t been damaged by the show. It looked like it was going to be strengthened by it, as Gordon had calculated all along.

  On their return into his real kitchens, Gordon and his other chefs all felt invigorated as well. ‘It’s nice that people now know what an onion is when you tell them to go and get one,’ said Angela Hartnett when asked how it felt to be back at the Connaught. ‘And it’s nice that they know how to peel it as well,’ added Mark Sargeant, safely back at Claridge’s.

  For Gordon, it was just a relief to be back working among ordinary people. He says that after Hell’s Kitchen he frequently found himself thinking along the same lines as Simon Cowell, that other equally honest television Mr Nasty. ‘In my job I get up, go to work and get on with it, but the people in Hell’s Kitchen didn’t seem to be able to do that,’ Gordon explained. ‘The problem is really simply about truth – it is the truth to be told when you are crap at something, but these days most people just can’t cope with that. I have never known people with such a huge amount of emotional baggage and I have never dealt with so much shit in my life.’

  Unfortunately for him, Gordon was not going to be allowed to slip back into the relative obscurity of his hotel and restaurant kitchens for long. The bosses at ITV made a snap decision that they wanted a second series of Hell’s Kitchen within a year. And they were so keen to have Gordon back at the helm that they were prepared to offer him £1 million for the privilege. That worked out as roughly £3,500 an hour of screen time, and would have catapulted Gordon from nowhere to the very top of the television earnings tree, well ahead of the hourly rates being paid to established stars such as Ant and Dec, Anne Robinson, Chris Tarrant and even Simon Cowell.

  Even more tempting was the fact that there seemed to be no shortage of big-name stars who said they would run to be in his kitchen – some of them quite literally. Olympic gold medallist Dame Kelly Holmes was a prime example. ‘Everyone is asking me what I am going to do next and one thing I would love to do is appear on Hell’s Kitchen,’ she said after watching the show. ‘I can identify with Gordon because he wants perfection and that’s what I have always been striving for all my professional life. He knows what it takes to reach the top, to be really good, and I can see he wants to pass that on to other people. So I wouldn’t at all mind him shouting and swearing at me. My only worry would be that I might let him down.’

  Gordon, however, was suddenly worried that he might have let himself down by taking part in the first series of Hell’s Kitchen, let alone by agreeing to a second. The man who had said he wanted the words ‘I am not a television chef’ carved on his gravestone had finally finished reading some of the cuttings about the first show. One of them in particular stood out – the one in which the Guardian called him ‘a celebrity chef turned gameshow host’. To a man as proud of his professionalism as Gordon, the description was horrific. But he had to admit that it rang ever so slightly true.

  After building a career around winning Michelin stars, he realised he felt increasingly uncomfortable being put head to head alongside the likes of Big Brother’s Nadia when internet bank Smile put together its poll to find the ‘celebrity of the year’. This wasn’t exactly what he had been aiming for when he had left Ibrox and resolved to carve out a new career at the very top of the restaurant business. The man who had spent so long wishing his father was alive to see his triumphs suddenly felt very glad that he wasn’t.

  Gordon and Tana talked long and hard about the future in the first few weeks after the Hell’s Kitchen set had been dismantled. They had a lot of cash in the bank – Gordon had collected an estimated £600,000 as star and co-creator of the original ITV show – so they knew money didn’t have to be the driving force in their decisions. What mattered more, Gordon decided, was his long-term credibility. And if that meant a choice between Hell’s Kitchen on ITV and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on Channel 4, he would pick the latter every time. For all the hype, he still saw it as a constructive, even educational, show. As well as entertaining viewers, he reckoned, it was a way of putting something back into the restaurant industry and, hopefully, raising standards across the country. It was for that, rather than for hosting a ‘gameshow’, that he wanted to be known.

  So Gordon called up the ITV bosses and gave them his answer. If they wanted to do a second series of Hell’s Kitchen, they would have to find someone else to host it. He was going to keep his head down for a while and focus on his restaurants. He was also going to spend a bit more time at home with his children. Because the balance of power in the Ramsay household was changing. After so many years in her husband’s shadow, it was Tana’s turn to grab some of the limelight.

  FIFTEEN

  HAPPY FAMILIES

  By the autumn of 2004, the Ramsay marriage was famous as one of the most enduring, if unorthodox, unions in show business. The pair certainly made a striking couple on their rare nights out in public together: Gordon with his broad shoulders, blond-streaked hair and sharp blue eyes, Tana petite and pretty with her flawless skin and big Julia Roberts smile. Always holding hands, constantly touching, they were clearly in love; even their clothes tended to complement each other – both in denim jackets for a quick meal at the Ivy, or in sparkling black shirts for a television awards show. And, as far as Gordon was concerned, the secret of their success could be explained in a single word: space.

  ‘We get on like a house on fire, always have, but I dread to think what the relationship would be like if I was there seven nights a week. We would probably be divorced,’ he admits.

  For her part, Tana picks a different five-letter word to explain how their marriage has survived. Her word is ‘trust’. ‘Spending long periods apart, it’s important that we trust one another,’ she said. ‘We speak up to ten times a day by phone. And when people ask, “How do you manage being on your own five nights a week?” I say, “Can you imagine having to think what to cook every night?” What we have may not work for everyone but it works very well for us.’

  And behind all the chauvinistic comments and joking one-liners, Gordon is more romantic and more of a family man than he lets on. For many years, he closed his flagship restaurants at weekends purely to spend more time with his wife and family, for example – a decision industr
y analysts say cost him around £500,000 a year in lost revenue. Weekends had been important to the couple before they had children and they became essential as their family grew. ‘From Monday to Friday, ours is a telephone relationship, so the weekends are catch-up time and the highlight of the week,’ says Gordon. ‘And when it comes to the kids I appreciate that, compared to some, we don’t have a lot of time together, but I do make sure it is quality time. I’d rather be a dad fantastically twice a week than methodically five times a week.’

  After getting home on Saturday morning at around 2am after his kitchens close, this ‘fantastic dad’ time tends to begin a lot sooner than he would like. ‘If I’m lucky it will be 6.15 when the kids wake me. If I’m not, it may be 5.45. They’ll prise open my eyelids, put their fingers in my ears, do whatever it takes to get me out of bed.’ As befits a family headed by a chef, food can play a big part in any weekend’s activities. The six-strong Ramsay clan can often be found wandering around farmers’ markets in Pimlico, Borough or Chelsea on Saturday mornings, before having soup, salad or a sandwich for lunch. Or at least soups, salads and sandwiches are the theory. In reality, Gordon admits that healthy eating can be thwarted because just yards from the family’s front door is a Pizza Express – and Britain’s most Michelin-starred chef says he finds himself in it far more often than he would like. ‘The kids love it, though Tana and I always say that the best thing to do before we take them there is to have a nice lunch ourselves first.’

  Anything energetic for the kids is normally next on Gordon’s agenda ‘in a bid to get them all tired out’, he says. But he accepts that he can sometimes drive Tana mad in the process. When he took three-year-old Jack out shopping for a new tracksuit one Saturday, the pair were gone so long that Tana finally rang Gordon’s mobile to check that they hadn’t got lost. ‘Did you get the tracksuit?’ she asked, when he reassured her that everything was fine and that they were on their way back home.

  ‘No, I forgot,’ he replied. ‘But we did buy a rabbit.’

  Father and son also share some secrets that might make Tana equally annoyed. Once a week, Gordon tries to take each of his children for lunch at a traditional cafe in Chelsea, for example. When it is Jack’s turn, he always gets a Coke, though the pair tell Tana that he sticks to apple juice. ‘We have a deal, we don’t rat on each other, so he becomes my best mate, which is very important to me,’ Gordon says.

  At weekends, it is only after the kids’ Saturday dinner, bath and story time that Gordon and Tana get to catch up with each other and with their friends – and Gordon is typically ungallant when it comes to describing what might be on offer if the Ramsays are hosting a party. He steers clear of the catering on his night off, and doesn’t throw in many compliments about what Tana makes in his place. ‘People might be anticipating the most amazing chicken fricassee with wild mushrooms and fresh tagliatelli, when what Tana will emerge with is a cottage pie – or Nigella’s green Thai curry. Anyone expecting five-star treatment from me when they come round is certainly in for a disappointment. We certainly don’t hold lavish dinner parties – too much like a busman’s holiday.’ Gordon may have his state-of-the-art £500,000 super-kitchen at home but it continues to be reserved solely for pleasure and for testing out new recipes. ‘I mean it when I say I’m thinking about keeping the door locked at other times,’ he says.

  Tana, however, has suggested that the real reason for his uncharacteristic shyness about the kitchen could be that he doesn’t actually know how to use a lot of the kit he had put in it. ‘I can only serve you instant coffee,’ she told Metro reporter Lisa Grainger when she came round to the house to interview her. ‘Gordon has had an all-singing, all-dancing coffee machine installed but we are both so useless at technology that we haven’t figured out how to use it. Give Gordon a sieve or a whisk and he’s fine. But phones, videos, TVs, anything with buttons – forget it. When he sent me his first-ever romantic text message last week, I was so shocked that he had figured out how to do it that I had to phone him straight back to check it was really him.’

  And having heard Gordon belittle the cottage pies and green curries she cooks for their parties, Tana is also ready to fight back with a story of her own. ‘At a dinner party in our old flat, Gordon got so carried away with his cooking that he set off all the home’s smoke alarms. The children woke up and were screaming, the place was in chaos and it was pretty much the worst party we ever had,’ she says.

  On weekdays, the Ramsays continue to muddle through in their loving, idiosyncratic way. Amazingly, Gordon claims not to carry a key to his house. ‘Every night he rings the bell whatever time it is. We make a cup of tea, take it to bed and catch up on the day’s events,’ says Tana of a routine many other wives would find intolerable. But late-night chats have always been the cornerstone of their relationship, right from the days when they would sit by the river outside Le Pont de la Tour or in Banbury after their restaurant shifts had ended, a time that they say now feels like several lifetimes ago. It is in the more recent late-night chats that they talk about the kids, their family and friends and the things they want to do. And in 2004 it was when Tana finally decided to go ahead with her new business venture.

  ‘I fell in love with India about two years ago on a holiday,’ she says. ‘As a country it is quite mad but it works, and when I looked around at the things you can buy in the shops there I realised so much of their stuff would be suitable for homes over here as well.’ The more Tana thought and talked about it the more she was convinced there was a business opportunity in importing and selling Indian goods. But could she really pull it off? For months, it became a big late-night topic of conversation with Gordon – and his view of her capabilities could be summed up in one short sentence. ‘If you can manage four kids, you can do this,’ he concluded just before she went ahead with her plan.

  The business was set up in partnership with her brother, Adam, and Gordon was able to offer a simple suggestion when they started looking for premises. The building next to his new Boxwood Cafe had been up for rent ever since the superbly named Minema Cinema had closed a couple of years earlier. Tana and Adam took a look and realised it was perfect. By picking a location so close to one of Gordon’s restaurants, Tana was also emphasising just how close her husband had become to her family. Many was the time that she and her brother were in the shop, at 41–5 Knightsbridge, while Gordon was less than a stone’s throw away at the Boxwood Cafe with her father, Chris, finance director of Gordon Ramsay Holdings. And Gordon’s loyalty to his extended family was complete. When Chris hit the headlines after being fined for breaking company law with his former firm, Kestrel Mould and Tooling Inc, his son-in-law refused to say a single word against him and said his position at Gordon Ramsay Holdings was entirely secure.

  Fitting out the new shop, to be called the Red Fort, took longer than Tana and Adam had expected. They wanted it filled with Indian treasures, including every type of furniture from beds and benches to tables and temple doors. They wanted cushions, rugs, saris, bedspreads, jewellery, candles, spice boxes – the list went on and on. They also wanted the connections and contacts in place so that they could source any other goods that clients might require, including architectural features and stonework. And, as the ever-growing stock list proved, they were thinking big from the very start. This was no vanity project for a rich wife, Tana said. It wasn’t just a small local shop that could be managed on housekeeping money. The Red Fort was taking up several thousand feet of prime West End space and the stock and fitting out had cost £700,000. It had to make some real money from the moment it opened, so the pressure was on.

  ‘This is your night, enjoy it.’

  Gordon squeezed Tana’s hand as they walked into the shop for its opening-night party. The event signalled the start of a new chapter in their lives together. For the first time they had hired a nanny to help out on the three days a week that Tana planned to work full-time, the days Megan was at school and the twins at a local nursery. And a few m
onths later, when their new lives had bedded down, everyone was happy with the way it was working out.

  ‘I’ve been the girlfriend, the wife, the mother, now it is about me again,’ said Tana when she was asked how she felt. ‘It’s also like stepping out of Gordon’s shadow. I don’t need to go out and work but I don’t want to live on the back of Gordon. I want to do my own thing, to have a life of my own and to find a niche beyond saying that dinner’s ready and on the table at eight. The return to work has actually fitted well into our lives. Being at home with the children in the early years was a very important stage for them and I wanted to make sure that they had the best start in life. I was there for all the important moments, from the first words to the first steps. But the time came when it was right for me to go back to work. I love the buzz that my life has now. There is never a spare moment. Gordon has always thrived on that and I suppose it has inspired me too. We both sit down exhausted at the end of the day but we know that, although things have been manic, they have also gone right.’

  The couple’s late-night chats had also been given a new lease of life by Tana’s new venture. ‘Rather than: “Well, darling, I was washing up today and found this fabulous new brand of rubber gloves!” I can tell him about our achievements at work and ask his advice. We can have a proper conversation again,’ she says. The kids were also thriving under the new regime – though something they told their mother one day showed that the foursome still had a lot to learn about their father. ‘I am usually the one who disciplines the kids if they are being naughty,’ says Tana. ‘And after one telling-off they said, “Well, I’m going to cuddle Daddy now because he doesn’t get cross.” And off they all went to him.’ Clearly, Megan, Jack, Holly and Matilda had not been allowed to watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.